1. Does the Hurricane Katrina story exhibit the distinguishing features of a crisis, as defined in the introductory essay you read from the Howitt and Leonard text this week?
A crisis as the World Health Organization (WHO) defines is a situation that is perceived as difficult and a time of danger or greater difficulty. Hurricane Katrina was absolutely a crisis that has all the feature of crisis and it is of national proportion and a devastating catastrophe; it was natural catastrophe, a human catastrophe, a technological catastrophe, and an environmental catastrophe.
Howitt and Leonard indicated that Katrina was a crisis because:
- The response to the situation revealed weakness of the system and poor level of preparedness by the local, state and federal authorities.
- The novelty of situation and its unusually large scale.
- The effects resulting from …show more content…
The real crisis occurred after landfall and there were inadequate preparation for levee breach. Response was prepared according their thought that the levees would hold. The emergency response plan did not include:
- Aquatic resources needed to be improvised - Adequate resources that would provide humanitarian aid.
- Contingencies that should be taken when the city was submerged under water.
- Rescuers were not trained in water rescue and there was no urban search. In addition, the United States office of Homeland Security reports Katrina as an Incident of National Significance (INS), and defined that as a potential high-impact event that requires a effective response coordination by an appropriate combination of federal, state and local authorities.
2. Were the core challenges of crisis response, described in the same introductory essay, confronted in this case?
Core challenges for effective emergency response are:
- Improvising for the unplanned
- scalability and surge capacity
- maintaining situational
A crisis as the World Health Organization (WHO) defines is a situation that is perceived as difficult and a time of danger or greater difficulty. Hurricane Katrina was absolutely a crisis that has all the feature of crisis and it is of national proportion and a devastating catastrophe; it was natural catastrophe, a human catastrophe, a technological catastrophe, and an environmental catastrophe.
Howitt and Leonard indicated that Katrina was a crisis because:
- The response to the situation revealed weakness of the system and poor level of preparedness by the local, state and federal authorities.
- The novelty of situation and its unusually large scale.
- The effects resulting from …show more content…
The real crisis occurred after landfall and there were inadequate preparation for levee breach. Response was prepared according their thought that the levees would hold. The emergency response plan did not include:
- Aquatic resources needed to be improvised - Adequate resources that would provide humanitarian aid.
- Contingencies that should be taken when the city was submerged under water.
- Rescuers were not trained in water rescue and there was no urban search. In addition, the United States office of Homeland Security reports Katrina as an Incident of National Significance (INS), and defined that as a potential high-impact event that requires a effective response coordination by an appropriate combination of federal, state and local authorities.
2. Were the core challenges of crisis response, described in the same introductory essay, confronted in this case?
Core challenges for effective emergency response are:
- Improvising for the unplanned
- scalability and surge capacity
- maintaining situational